“And that?”
“That you’ll be kind to my little Elsa when she comes.”
“I’ll be a mother to her,” said Eileen, “but she must come quick or I’ll be gone.”
“Gone?”
Wickham spoke with dismay in his voice. I think he had counted on Eileen as his stand-by when Elsa would need a friend in England.
“Hush now!” said “Daddy” Small. “It’s my secret, you wicked lady with black eyes and a mystical manner.”
“Doctor,” said Eileen, “your own President rebukes you. ‘Open covenants openly arrived at—weren’t those his words for the new diplomacy?”
“Would to God he had kept to them,” said the little doctor, bitterly, launching into a denunciation of the Peace Conference until I cut him short with a question.
“What’s this secret, Doctor?”
He pulled out his pocket-book with an air of mystery.